Head Games (32 page)

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Authors: Eileen Dreyer

BOOK: Head Games
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Rhett wasn't going to be deterred. “Molly, you need to know this.”
Molly closed her eyes and sighed. “Sit down then and get it over with. Then I'll tell you the interesting stuff.”
Rhett sat. He shot a longing look over toward the teapot, but Molly was way past playing hostess.
“Your neighbor's grocery guy—uh …”
“Allen.”
“Yeah, Allen. It's an alias.”
Molly sat down on her own chair at that. “What's his name?”
“Everett K. Thorne—K for Keith, by the way. We can't be quite
that
lucky. Anyway, he's got a pretty interesting rap sheet all full of B&E and petty theft charges that go back to California and Washington. He's only been here three or four years.”
“No sex stuff?”
“Not that I've found. But then, we, uh, can't seem to find him, either. He has an address in Maplewood, but evidently, he's rarely there. Nobody's seen him in the last few days.”
“Him, too? What about Lewis from the morgue? Have you caught up with him, yet?”
“Yeah. We found him. He's creepy, but there's nothing more concrete than that yet. Winnie sure doesn't like us accusing her dieners of serial murder, does she?”
“She's funny like that. But you think Allen bears more watching.” Molly waited for a nod and looked back at that chart she hadn't let go of. “I don't suppose his name was ever Peter Wilson.”
Rhett frowned. “You really want me to pay attention to this Peter Wilson thing, don't you?”
“What a bright boy you are. I know you'll figure it out for yourself.” She handed over the chart. “Note the name. Note what I called him in my notes. Specifically. Several times.”
Rhett skimmed the chart once, then again. “What do you think?” he asked, looking up.
“Do you respect nurse instincts?”
“Every bit as much as I respect cop instincts.”
“In that case, it means something.”
“Great. I can run it tonight. Davidson's still down at the office.”
Molly climbed to her feet, suddenly shaken by the idea that she might actually be able to put a face to her correspondent. That she might have to face him and admit she knew him.
“Then that demands a celebration.”
She'd barely gotten hold of the Stoly she hid in the broken coffeepot when Magnum jumped up, barking. Somebody started pounding on the back door.
Magnum backed up, barking like a real guard dog. Rhett reached for his hip holster and bolted for the door. Molly jumped so high she dropped the bottle. It shattered, spraying the floor with vodka and glass, and all Molly could do was stare at it.
“Molly?”
She looked up to see Rhett poised in the open doorway, his expression caught between dread and exhilaration, a uniformed officer standing just outside on her step.
“What?”
“They caught somebody prowling the neighborhood. He has two pair of women's panties and won't give them his name. You want to see if you know him?”
No. She didn't. She wanted to finish her Stoly's, but it was all over the damn floor.
Dear sweet Jesus, she thought in sudden terror, let it be a serial killer in her backyard. Let it be Kenny come to call so the police could just sweep him up like trash.
“Aw, hell,” she capitulated, a shaking hand to her epigastric area. “Why not? The way things are going, it's probably Sam.”
She heard the escalating noise of discovery, the proverbial baying of
the newshounds out front as they caught the scent of something happening. She stood stock still in a widening pool of vodka as a cadre of patrol cops tumbled in her back door, their captive caught in unyielding hands and hooded with one of their jackets.
Molly felt unaccountably afraid and backed away. No, come to think of it, she didn't want to know. She wasn't ready for this.
And then, like David Copperfield at the sound of a drumroll, one of the cops lifted that jacket, and Molly felt another big rock hit her head.
Blinking in the fluorescents of her kitchen and smiling as if he'd pulled the biggest prank of his life, there, in the middle of her kitchen floor surrounded by scowling police, stood Patrick.
“Hi, Aunt Molly,” Patrick greeted her with the nonchalance of a carny.
Rhett gaped. Every one of the patrol cops flushed. It was nothing compared to what Molly was feeling.
“You want to explain this?” she demanded.
One of the cops stepped forward, but Molly waved him off. “Not you. Him.”
“Can I get these off?” Patrick asked, lifting his arms a little to remind them all that he was cuffed.
“No. Talk.”
“Were those her … uh, things you had?” one of the cops asked.
Patrick, unbelievably, laughed. “You hosin' me? What the fuck would I want with my aunt's underwear?”
Molly actually spent a moment fighting dizziness. Just how absurd could this get? “So you
have
been playing Peeping Tom?” she asked, knowing the answer from his smirk. “I don't suppose you shoplifted the panties.”
His gaze was level. “What fun would that be?”
Molly closed her eyes for a second and thought how profoundly silent that kitchen was for all the cops in it. “I guess I can't hope you guys would just look the other way while I strangle the life out of him, would you?” she asked.
“Be tough to get the body past all the camera crews,” Rhett objected.
Molly snorted. “That's what basements and potting soil are for.”
“Works for me,” one of the patrols said. “I hate paperwork.”
Molly opened her eyes. “In that case you're going to hate this. I'm
sure Patrick will remember that I warned him about this type of behavior. He is, proverbially and in any other way possible, all yours.”
She got not a few scowls from the cops. “You sure?” one asked.
Patrick was literally agape. “You're going to let them just arrest me? For this! It's only a couple pair of panties. I never touched anybody.”
“If you didn't get them off a clothesline, that's breaking and entering, Patrick.”
He paled as if she'd hit him. “Do you know what this is going to do to the parents?”
“You don't care what it does to your parents,” she snapped. “But you should care what it's going to do to Sam. I asked you to protect that old man, Patrick. How could you do this to him?”
“Well, let me go and I'll make it up to him,” he wheedled.
“Call Frank,” she advised instead, deliberately turning away. “I hear he's a good lawyer.”
“He doesn't even like me.”
“Fortunately, you don't need a lawyer to like you. Even better, he was released from the hospital today.”
“But Aunt Molly … !”
She turned back on him from a safer distance. “You want to tell me what else you've been up to? These nice men and women are going to find out sooner or later anyway. Which means you'll probably lose that job we worked so hard to get.”
For that she got a sneer. “Spare me. I ditched that chickenshit place two weeks ago. Like you give a damn.”
Molly just slumped into a kitchen chair and laughed. “Of course you did. I'm probably not even surprised. Should I send this crew upstairs to search for stolen goods?”
Patrick huffed. “I don't live here anymore, remember?”
Molly glared at him. “If you've done anything to compromise that old man next door …”
“You know better than that!” he protested, for all the world looking seriously outraged.
Molly wasn't sure she could buy it anymore. “I don't seem to know better than anything tonight.”
“You know this'll go on my record,” he whined. “I don't need that right now, Aunt Molly.”
Molly considered him a moment, those beautiful, liquid eyes and angelic beauty. The mercurial mind and heartbreaking self-destructiveness. God, she wanted to get her hands around her brother's neck, because he'd been the one to create this mess and then leave it in her lap without any kind of instructions. All she had was the increasing conviction that no one in Patrick's life had taught him the consequences of his actions. That even now it might be too late. That she still didn't have a choice in the matter.
“I told you,” she said sadly. “My rules are simple and inviolate. You broke them. You broke the law. You have to figure out what that means. This, I'm afraid, is the way you do that.”
Patrick didn't say another word. Neither did Molly. But it was as they were spiriting Patrick back out the door that Molly flashed on the moment four nights earlier when Patrick had walked in the house with singed eyebrows and a tale of a fire at the restaurant where he worked. Where he really hadn't been working after all.
And she didn't know what to do about it.
“Molly?” Rhett asked softly behind her. “You all right?”
Molly sprang to her feet. “You want some tea, Rhett? I want some goddamn tea.”
What she pulled out was another full bottle of Stoly.
 
 
At least they got a solid handle on Kenny. It was the next day after Rhett had brought Patrick home to Sam's and the old man had sufficiently harangued the apparently chastised child, all the while patting the boy's hands as if to cushion the blow of his anger. Molly slipped out Sam's back door and carried her charts and hip flask down to the station and holed up in that airless, soundproof room with several cups of Sam's tea to warm her and logbooks to distract her.
She needed to do something about Patrick. She'd made a quick recon of his room the night before to find another half dozen pair of panties and a stack of old
Hustler
magazines, but no items purloined from either Sam or herself, and no hydrocarbon residue of any kind. But Patrick's parents
were seven thousand miles away, and his housekeeper wasn't talking about what he might have been running from when he'd strolled into Molly's house.
Sam prescribed
nudging
and watchful support. Frank recommended the Alcatraz Summer Camp. And Molly, who had once again lost contact with the entire country of China, could only hesitate, because she simply didn't know.
So she sipped her tea and leafed through her logbooks and ignored everything but that one name that should damn well have meant more to her than it did.
Kenny.
She found him again in late September. A thin chart about a bike accident resulting in an injured elbow and some faint bruising along the chest. No scrapes, which one would have thought would have shown up from a bike accident. No cooperation from the mother, who'd brought the child in.
Peter K. Wilson. Molly actually smiled. At least she hadn't been completely nuts all those years ago.
After that, it was easy, because Peter had come often. And not just for injuries, although those were certainly represented. For possible asthma attacks, for sore throat, for fever. Mostly brought by his mother. Most injuries significant and suspicious, most medical complaints benign. Real hurts and manufactured ills for clandestine attention. All seen by Molly.
And one chart that sent absolute chills through her. The last chart. That chart recorded bruising on that young body, possible ligature marks at wrists and ankles, and the worst. The most horrific.
Cockroach bites.
At least thirty inflamed cockroach bites.
Just how long would a child have to be tied down, where would he have had to be, to suffer more than two dozen cockroach bites without being able to get away?
What in God's name would it have done to him?
Molly collected all Kenny's charts, every one to the last, and sat staring at them, knowing with absolute certainty that she was looking at the tracks of their killer. She saw the nurse's notes trace his changes from hesitant,
pleasant child, to the kind of specter she could almost see through. Silent, empty-eyed, still. As if he were becoming invisible before her eyes.
Which was precisely what he'd been doing. Just like Kathy had known all along.
The only problem was that Molly couldn't remember a thing about him. Not even, God help her, a small body full of cockroach bites. She sat for a good two hours, sipping at the Stoly-enhanced tea until her eyebrows got numb and staring at the old face sheets, but she couldn't pull up a single image or thought or impression to go with those sparse facts.
Kenny was right. He was invisible. He'd grown to adulthood with the belief that only one person in the world, like a psychological
Topper
, could see him. The only problem was that, after all was said and done, she'd lost him, too.
“Aren't you getting tired of this place?” Kathy asked, leaning in the doorway.
Molly blinked a bit at her. “What are you doing back here? I thought you were busy putting your new office into shape, now that our federal government is back in business.”
Kathy grinned. “Been there, done that. It's after six, when normal people go home to their pets and exercise machines. The government has decided that I can pull extra duty on your team.”
Molly just nodded, as if she'd figured that out already. “Wanna read some charts? Tell you everything we know about Kenny?”
Kathy took another step in and cadged a peek at Molly's high-octane tea. “Enjoying your stroll down memory lane, huh?”
Molly sighed and rubbed weary eyes. “That's just the problem. There is no memory. I don't remember him.” She gestured to the charts she'd fanned out on the table. “Considering the fact that I reported that family to DFS three times, you'd think I would, wouldn't you?”
Kathy slid into the other chair. “What'd you report them for?”
“Suspicious injuries. Failure to thrive. Lots of mentions here of alcohol on the parents' breath. Pretty classic stuff. The parents must have finally caught on to what I was trying to do, because there's a late note on the last chart that when DFS went to check the home, the family had disappeared.” She sighed, tapping the chart. “Abusers might be assholes, but they're not idiots.”
Kenny's last ED chart was dated a week before Molly had gone on maternity leave. By the time she'd come back, she'd probably forgotten all the effort she'd made on Kenny's behalf. Just like all the other efforts she'd forgotten.
“Your charting is pretty clear here,” Kathy said, taking her own look. “No mistaking your impressions … ah, he was eleven, huh? We're right on target. Poor kid, look at all those injuries.”
“Which should have left pretty big scars for somebody down the line to recognize,” Molly said. “He had keloid scarring, which is obvious and never goes away. It also looks like he was already forming some pretty interesting personality disorders.”
“You can see that here?”
Molly smiled and pointed to a particular set of medical initials in her notes. “W.L.K.,” she said. “Weird Little Kid. It was kind of a catch-all description for nondiagnosable bizarre behavior. We also had F.L.K., which meant Funny Looking Kid, meaning something was physically or genetically wrong, we just couldn't pin it down.”
Kathy nodded. “Uh-huh. You notice he also manufactured problems just to come see you.” Her eyes soft, she shook her head. “Can you imagine how horrible it was if an emergency room nurse seemed to be the only person he could turn to?”
No, Molly thought, she couldn't. She didn't want to. A person simply didn't hurt for a guy who was chopping up bodies to build his friends with. But looking down on the traces of the desperate, hunted little boy he'd once been, she did.
“The cops are out there running down any records there might be of Peter Wilson,” Kathy said, back to business.
“Like if he has any recognizable aliases?”
“Like that. Rhett's doing a microscopic check on your friends Lewis and Allen, but nothing's ringing bells so far. And we haven't found any local hits on a Peter Wilson after the age of seventeen when he would have come out of juvenile blackout, which means he probably did leave town when he was eleven and come back a lot later as somebody else. On the other hand, I don't think he went alias by the time he was seventeen, so some kind of record should show up. I'm hoping hard for B&E, weenie
wagging, and sexual assault.” Kathy unfocused, the predator's eyes going vague with odd yearnings. “God, what I'd give for anything in those early years. Anybody who saw the fantasy before it became the crime scene.”
“There isn't a box to check off on ED charts for that, I'm afraid.”
“They would have been cementing into his sexual impulses about then, ya know. All that rage and terror and need for control pairing up with the most powerful impulse known to the universe to set his pattern.” Kathy sighed, the archaeologist trying to pull juice and substance from bits of distant stone. “One of these days, we'll have the sense to ask those questions before a kid gets to the active participation stage. One day we'll be able to circumvent the process.”

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